I don't believe in gravity...
Atheists risk turning into Lamias in some game worlds.
Either that or Atheists believe all gods are similar to Lamias, monsters with supernatural powers, but also able to grant spells.
In a setting such as planescape where reality is literally made up of belief, such a spell resistance might fit (the Athar mentioned before had some ways to resist divine magic simply by not believing in it, IIRC). However, in one where that is not the norm, it would have to be a very specific power. Maybe something that could fit as a high-level ability for a monk archetype focused on "belief is power", but not something to just give for free.
The simple answer is no - refusing to believe in something's existence in no way affects its ability to affect you. It's as illogical as giving a character damage resistance to metal because metal doesn't exist. Or for a modern world parallel having a belief that electricity doesn't exist would somehow give you the ability to grab a high voltage cable safely.
The difference is if the power of the gods is based on the belief in the gods, such as in the Planescape (and did someone mention Eberron? I don't know about that one) setting.
Also, if the power of the gods are based on the amount of worship they get and is different in different areas because of how much worship they get (as I've understood it, this is how it works in faerun - the more that worship Chauntea the more power she gets, and in an area where loads of people worship her she can do more stuff), something like SR could be explained - by a strong enough "anti-worship" as a mental discipline, maybe the atheist can enact like a bubble where the god's power is severely diminished.
It's not impossible to fluff something like "SR against divine spells for some atheist characters", but it's not part of the default fluff.
EDIT: Not to spoil too much, but in the planescape computer game Torment, it is possible to un-believe a powerful being by strict willpower, so that it stops existing.
To the OP : the Disbeliever trait from the Inner Sea Primer (in the Rahadoum section I believe) is very close to what you're looking for : +2 to saves vs divine but you HAVE to make a save vs ANY divine spell cast on you, even beneficial ones.
This is what I came to say. Yes, Rahadoumi Disbeliever is the trait.
Secular Humanists believe all power, supernatural or not, comes from humans. Q in Star Trek is a race that previously evolved beyond mortality.
My point is that Lamias are somehow cursed by a good religion to become monsters. They hate organized good religions. Page 186 the Bestiary. It says it in a more complicated way. They have cleric like powers, self generated. A character class that uses divine spells to fight religion, might risk turning the character into a Lamia, or a noble lamia if they get to a higher level before turning.
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I wonder if a PC atheist should get spell resistance. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and if an unbeliever PC is an unbeliever, he should reap the rewards.
My atheist wizard is not concerned with your religious beliefs or lack thereof.
As a side note, the history of heresy trait gives a bonus to saving throws vs divine magic.
Being an atheist in a setting where divinely empowered clerics perform miracles that are miraculous even by the standards of 20th level wizards (like raising the dead) is too delusional to function as a PC.
It's like believing the moon landings are fake. When you're living in a moonbase and have seen the bottom half of the Apollo 11 lander with your own eyes.
Or believing the world is flat when you've personally circumnavigated it.
If your world is like Golarion or the Forgotten Realms or most other D&D settings you should not allow atheist PCs at all.
well, there is a little in game fluff for a nation of atheists (rahadoum). Not quite spell resistance, but relative...
As a person who rejects covenants with gods, your belief is strong enough to repel divine spells.
Benefit: You gain a +2 trait bonus on saving throws against divine spells, but you must make a saving throw even when that magic is beneficial to you.
Using the term atheism in these game related/setting related things is certainly inaccurate, probably misleading, and definitely confusing. If they'd used misotheism (hatred of god/s) for things like Rahadoum and some other term for characters like Ezren who don't worship anyone (Faithless, though FR might have a peg on that one, dunno) it might have been less so.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that Golarion "atheists" don't believe the gods exist. They either probably believe that the gods aren't worth worshiping/revering/obeying, and/or that they're little more than the next step up from high level/mythic characters and thus just really really powerful but otherwise just people/creatures.
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Yes. The truth is that I cannot be 100% sure that I actually exist.Let me introduce you to my friend Descartes. His famous statement means that you can prove your existence... TO YOURSELF. Just not to anyone else.
"I took my friend Descartes to my favorite bar yesterday. The bartender asked him "A whiskey for you mate?" Descartes replied. "I think not."... and vanished.
I covered that. "I think, therefore I am" is not a proof. It is just another layer on a self-referential onion. I have to think to accept proof. So how to I prove I am thinking?
Sigma-six applies to a situation in which there is enough significance to make the error-bar LESS than 00.0001% That takes a great deal of quantized data, and applying it to something as vague and poorly characterized as belief in some kind of diety is ... an inappropriate use of the concept.
Enjoy your game!
Which is exactly my point. In matters of faith, you are never going to get anywhere close to that level of certainty. There isn't enough objective data available, and the interpretation that data can be very subjective.
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I wonder if a PC atheist should get spell resistance. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and if an unbeliever PC is an unbeliever, he should reap the rewards.
For an 'atheist,' (in the context of a setting where the gods grant real spellcasting abilities to their agents in the mortal plane, someone who just thinks that they are, at best, uppity outsiders who conned a bunch of schmucks into worshipping them, and, at worst, figments of their 'priests' imaginations to rationalize their own ability to channel magic in a way distinct from how wizards and sorcerers do it) it really doesn't make much sense for them to treat divine or arcane spellcasting differently, or to have any particular resistance to it.
Indeed, their disinterest in such things might make them *more* susceptible to magic! Ignorance of how poisons work doesn't make one immune to an adder bite, after all, and can prove dangerous if one's disinterest in the topic led to not having any idea how to treat such an injury.
Now, all that aside, if someone actively loathes a particular type of spellcasting, such as seeing arcane magic as 'the devil's work' or seeing divine spellcasting as signs that someone has made pacts with outsiders and sold their souls and whatnot (which, kind of, is true...), then a person, or even a culture (such as Rahadoum) could develop very specific traits or racial alternate features, such as a trait that gives them +1 to all saves vs. divine magic and the spell-like abilities of outsiders, or a racial alternate feature that gives them an even better bonus, but *requires* them to save even against harmless divine magic, such as cure light wounds from a cleric, adept, oracle, druid, etc. (but not the same cure light wounds from a witch, alchemist or bard!).
A 'Maltheist' sort of Archetype for Fighters, Barbarians or even arcane spellcasters (from Razmiran or Rahadoum or Touvette) would be one way to work this, or a set of Feats, or both (I'd prefer Feats since anyone can take them, saving the nuisance of creating a half dozen Archetypes for 'Rahadoumi Shield of Man Fighter' or 'Razmiri Faithslayer Rogue' or 'Wizard of the Seventh Sacrilege'). The option could include divine-specific Spell Resistance, as well as requiring saves vs. harmless divine magic, and perhaps a few other bonuses, such as the ability to recognize the difference between divine and arcane magic (which normally can only be done by the arcane sight spell).
Similarly, a group that loathes arcane magic, such as the barbarian class of 1st edition's Unearthed Arcana, could have the same sorts of features / feats, but tuned to 'godless wizards.' The same feats could even be used, with a line in the feat reading 'choose one type of magic, arcane or divine, when you take this feat.' That way one feat can represent each option, and cover the flavor of god-hating arcanists or wizard-hating barbarians or various other options. In a campaign with Psionics, the same feat chain could work for 'psionics' as a 'magic type,' to represent members of a group or culture that actively hate and assault psionics-users.
There might even be some fine-tuning options. If one chooses only a single school of magic, the bonuses might be higher, so that one could play members of a church or arcane brotherhood or culture that have no general problem with arcane or divine magic, but utterly loathe any sort of necromancy, and get bonuses to recognize anyone using a necromancy spell, to resist necromancy spells and perhaps even, at the end of the feat chain, a chance to counter or even reflect a necromancy spell used upon them back upon it's caster!
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I suspect that we may be asking the wrong question -- or at least a question several conceptual layers away from the real uncertainty.
What does it mean to be 'divine' in a Pathfinder setting in general, and on Golarion in particular?
There's been some attempt at importing some real-world notions and behaviours, but I suggest that these notions and concepts do not suit a Pathfinder world. The most obvious example is that of phenomena we would deem supernatural is part of the Pathfinder-world objective reality.
The debate and framework of any such understanding must start from first principles since the debate and understanding of our own world is so completely different. I don't pretend to know what that understanding might end up being, but it is interesting to ponder.
Happiness All --
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I suspect that we may be asking the wrong question -- or at least a question several conceptual layers away from the real uncertainty.
What does it mean to be 'divine' in a Pathfinder setting in general, and on Golarion in particular?
There's been some attempt at importing some real-world notions and behaviours, but I suggest that these notions and concepts do not suit a Pathfinder world. The most obvious example is that of phenomena we would deem supernatural is part of the Pathfinder-world objective reality.
The debate and framework of any such understanding must start from first principles since the debate and understanding of our own world is so completely different. I don't pretend to know what that understanding might end up being, but it is interesting to ponder.
Happiness All --
Agreed, a significant amount of what is considered supernatural here is natural in PF.
My thought process is more Baysian probability based(IE looking at the ratio of probabilities for and against). Magic only increases the number of possible ways something can happen and thus tends to weaken the probability ratio in favor of mundane explainations. As a side note, I just realized that the lower technology level in most fantasy worlds actually reduces the chances of someone surviving disease and injuries via mundane methods. This actually makes a magical hypothesis even easier to test. In fact, by Pathfinder RAW, the power of a divine caster would be fairly easy to test scientifically.
Take a group of people who have contracted a disease with a 20% survival rate with medical treatment(IE average expert's heal check). A test group of 100 people get prayed for(IE Cure Disease) and have a 100% survival rate. That is puts the odds at 10^60 in favor of the priests having some kind of power to cure disease. You would win the Powerball Lottery 5 times in a row before you hit those odds. Similar experiments in our world yield results that a typically no better than the placebo effect(5-10% improvement over expected outcomes), usually get ratios of greater than 10:1 against divine intervention (IE divine intervention is 10 times less likely that the sum of all other explainations).
TLDR: It would take a fairly extreme level of insanity to deny that divine casters in Pathfinder do not have any kind of magical power, and that doesn't address the issues of objective vs subjective reality.
Similar experiments in our world yield results that a typically no better than the placebo effect(5-10% improvement over expected outcomes), usually get ratios of greater than 10:1 against divine intervention (IE divine intervention is 10 times less likely that the sum of all other explainations).
An interesting thing that I read is that during a test for if prayer lessened the risk of complications when getting an operation, when the test subjects where prayed for, and knew they where prayed for, the risk of complications actually increased slightly.
The conclusion was sort of a reverse placebo - Those that knew they where prayed for got the feeling that "oh god this is serious s+*+" which made it worse. Kinda.|
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Agreed, a significant amount of what is considered supernatural here is natural in PF.
Very true.
Negative energy, for instance, is a natural part of the D&D/PF cosmology in which it exists, no more 'unnatural' or 'bad' than positive energy, which is *also* an alien energy from another dimension entirely that sometimes causes meat to get up and lurch around, and when it goes away, the meat falls down and becomes an object, and no longer is considered a creature.
Arcane magic, on the other hand, might be seen by some as 'more natural' than divine magic, because it doesn't explicity come from other dimensional outsiders or 'gods,' but can be tapped by people right there on that plane of existence.
That creates a kind of odd situation 'though, where druid magic (which is divine and therefore could be seen as otherworldly and 'alien' to this world) is *more unnatural* than a wizard violating the laws of space and time with magics like teleport or time stop.
Somewhere in Golarion, philosophers are no doubt arguing this sort of stuff, along with heady questions like how many Lantern Archons can dance on the head of a pin.
Similar experiments in our world yield results that a typically no better than the placebo effect(5-10% improvement over expected outcomes), usually get ratios of greater than 10:1 against divine intervention (IE divine intervention is 10 times less likely that the sum of all other explainations).An interesting thing that I read is that during a test for if prayer lessened the risk of complications when getting an operation, when the test subjects where prayed for, and knew they where prayed for, the risk of complications actually increased slightly.
The conclusion was sort of a reverse placebo - Those that knew they where prayed for got the feeling that "oh god this is serious s#$@" which made it worse. Kinda.
There have been lots of studies. Some positive and some negative. The most positive study I know of shows an effect no better than placebo.
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You should realize that in a fantasy setting, the word "Supernatural" takes a different meaning than it does in RL. While from our perspective a man conjuring fire in his hands out of nowhere on top of not injuring himself is supernatural, in a fantasy world that is not truly supernatural. It is at most rare/uncommon. And better defined as magical, rather than "supernatural".
An atheist in that world would have never encountered anything supernatural from their perspective, but might have encountered magic in some form or another, and would think of it like that, culture permitting.
People and cultures growing up in a world of magic would not "disbelieve" magic used, they would either accept it and embrace its use, dismiss it as something that is not part of their personal lives, or outright shun it.
A wizard never claims gods gave it power, a cleric does. They both create magical effects that to the unlearned are similar and possibly divine. Their view is colored by how magic either destroyed or built (most likely a bit of both) their reality.
An atheist in FL (fantasy life) would believe a man with hands on fire before him really has his hands on fire, and can burn him, but would probably not believe it was given to him by any higher power. If that person did good or bad with that fire, an atheist would not attribute either (or any other action for that matter) to a higher power.
If you gave a character a bonus for being atheist (probably a bonus to saves against powers from any divine source, as long as he or she is aware that it is a divine source), remember that the flip side of the coin is that only characters with faith and who are cleric/pally/druid get benefits for said faith. You may consider giving something to the faithful who happen to be other classes as well, at least for balance.